Apple Has Eye of Software Makers
It wasn’t long ago that John Carmack had given up on the Macintosh. The machine had too few users, it was too expensive for most people, and it was too slow for serious game players.
Carmack’s position was of more than casual interest to Apple Computer, the Macintosh’s creator. As technical director of Dallas-based Id Software and the creative force behind the notoriously popular first-person shooter games “Doom” and “Quake,” he was an opinion-shaper for the entire multibillion-dollar computer gaming industry.
Yet John Carmack is now a believer in the Mac. In January he announced that the eagerly awaited game “Quake 3 Arena” would be released simultaneously for Windows-based PCs and the Macintosh. That moment marked a milestone in the renewal of Apple Computer as a contender in the PC industry.
To be sure, Carmack’s previous opinion had been widely shared by software developers, who had largely stopped writing programs for the Macintosh. As the number of Macintosh versions of popular software programs declined, the platform was in danger of dying from starvation.
(Because the internal architecture of Windows and Macintosh machines are so different--ranging from the very chips that function as their brains to their basic software, or operating systems--programs written for one cannot be run on the other without significant rewriting.)
But after six profitable quarters, the introduction last August of the iMac--one of the hottest PC models released in years--and fundamental changes in Apple’s approach to both hardware and software design, many game developers are returning to the Macintosh fold.
The development could hardly be more timely. PC Data, a market-research company in Reston, Va., says the number of commercial software titles available for the Macintosh dropped from 2,900 in the first half of 1998 to about 2,800 for the same period this year--compared with about 11,000 titles for Windows PCs. Game titles declined from 410 in 1998 to 350 this year, compared with 1,900 on Windows. Total revenues show a similar decline, although unit sales for Mac games are up modestly.
Apple cautions against taking PC Data numbers as gospel--the research group tracks only retail and mail-order sales, about 80% of the market. It does not measure direct sales from publisher to consumer, a traditionally important channel in the Mac market. And because most Mac games are sold in hybrid Win-Mac CDs--a user of either platform buys the same disk--it can be difficult to tease out the Macintosh portion of sales.
But industry observers say the return of software developers to the Macintosh fold should start showing up in sales numbers soon.
Moreover, in some software categories, such as personal productivity, small business and graphic design, Macintosh software vendors have experienced modest gains in the last year, according to San Jose-based DataQuest.
But Apple clearly is only beginning a long road back to game developers’ hearts. Among the top 10 games, only one--Cyan Inc.’s “Myst”--is available on the Mac.
“We haven’t seen a huge increase in our sales because of the iMac or the G3 [Apple’s high-end line of desktop computers],” said Cindy Swanson, marketing manager for MacSoft in Plymouth, Minn., a leading vendor of Mac games. “A lot of the iMac people are brand-new computer users, and they’re not gamers yet.”
iMac Jump-Started Apple’s Comeback
Little more than a year ago, software publishers castigated Apple for its lack of a coherent Internet strategy. The company answered with the iMac--a curvaceous, brightly colored, translucent departure from PC orthodoxy that features easy Internet access for novices. The iMac comes without the floppy drive for transferring files that has been an industry standard since the PC’s inception--a move meant to focus users outward, toward the World Wide Web.
Apple rode the strategy to 26% sales growth in the last year, ending years of declining fortunes and increasing its worldwide share of the PC market to 3.4% in the first quarter of 1999, according to Framingham, Mass.-based International Data Corp.
But the approach may have worked a little too well for software publishers. Because many iMac users view the machine primarily as a portal to the Web, they at first appeared to be spending less time and money on stand-alone applications.
But developers and Apple say the growing popularity of the Mac is beginning to shift the trend lines toward increased software sales, particularly as iMac users grow more experienced and their computing needs broaden.
Software developer MacKiev Labs, an obscure company based in Kiev, Ukraine, has emerged as an unlikely poster child for that shift. MacKiev does nothing but alter applications designed for Windows so that they operate on a Macintosh. Known as “porting,” the process produces nearly all new Mac software. MacKiev, possibly the largest porting shop, employs 100 engineers--including many former nuclear scientists who found themselves out of work after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ukrainian American Jack Minsky started the company in 1997 with his brother Steve. Solving the Mac software shortage “was our focus and dream as Mac fanatics,” he said.
For a year Minsky fended off skeptics who called him crazy to build a business around a moribund computer platform. Now MacKiev has to turn away customers.
One of the Ukrainian scientists’ biggest projects, due for release this summer, is “Sim City 3000”--the top-selling computer game in the country this year.
Software publishers also showed their renewed interest at Apple’s annual developer conference in May, which drew about 2,600 participants, up from 1,750 last year.
To be sure, only a handful of conference attendees were new to the Mac, said Clent Richardson, Apple’s vice president for worldwide developer relations. But Apple continues to enjoy support from such giants as Microsoft and Intuit, the maker of the best-selling Quicken personal-finance software. And many former allies are taking a fresh look.
Once-Arrogant Apple Takes New Approach
Part of the reason for the return of software developers is a newfound flexibility on the part of traditionally arrogant Apple. Developers were palpably relieved when the company indicated that forthcoming versions of the Macintosh operating system would make it much easier and cheaper to keep their products current.
Changes in Apple’s approach to games have been equally dramatic.
“[Previously] you got the impression that they didn’t consider games important to their platform,” Carmack said, calling the company’s proprietary programming tools “a technical dead end” and its relations with developers “a joke.”
When Apple asked him to join its game advisory group last August, he was skeptical, particularly when interim Chief Executive Steve Jobs tried to persuade Carmack to use a new graphics technology being developed by Pixar Animation Studios, the other company Jobs heads. He figured Apple was up to its old tricks--pushing proprietary software tools that it alone could control.
But Jobs eventually backed off and met two key conditions that Carmack and other game experts had wanted for years.
One was the adoption of OpenGL--a software technology for building and displaying high-quality 3-D graphics that has become a standard in the gaming world. Developers were elated because OpenGL, along with the increasing similarity between the Windows and Macintosh operating systems, lets them port Windows titles more easily and cheaply to the Mac--making the relatively tiny Mac market potentially profitable at last.
Apple also souped up its machines to handle today’s computing-intensive games. Games are the most demanding computer applications most users ever encounter, and the new Mac’s added power allows game developers to provide the 3-D realism game addicts crave.
Given the long lag time for creating games, the impact of those changes has not yet been felt by game buyers. But game publishers believe that game enthusiasts, including those who use iMacs, will ultimately buy lots of software despite the growth of Web-based games because they can only get top performance on highly visual games when running them directly off their own machines.
“Sim City” publisher Electronic Arts, which had no Mac products in the works as recently as six months ago, “now has stated plans for about 10,” Richardson said.
Mac versions of other important games, such as “Star Wars: Episode I Racer” and “Madden NFL 2000” are also in the works. Game developer Activision Studios will release four or five titles for the Macintosh this year; last year it released none. Some other publishers are following suit.
Apple’s Full Recovery Still in Doubt
Still, many developers are proceeding cautiously--porting a small proportion of Windows titles until they see if Apple’s recovery will hold. Apple’s past tendency to pull the rug out from under its partners, combined with its small market, gives them pause.
Complex games cost millions of dollars to create and are built around guesses about how much game hardware will improve 18 months later, said Doug Lombardi, marketing product manager of Sierra Studios. Publishers expect Windows PCs and game consoles to keep pace technologically, but will the Mac?
“Overall, I’m a pretty big proponent of the Apple hardware,” said Carmack, who said that his products run well on Macintosh G3 computers. “But a lot of Mac people do blind themselves as to the quantifiable performance. No one can honestly say [Macs] are faster than the PC--or even as fast.” He called the iMac “marginally acceptable”--dangerously faint praise in an environment where fast, cheap PCs are ubiquitous.
“Any high-end gamer can always add cards and soup up their machine. What we are trying to do is offer the best out-of-the-box experience,” said Nancy Underwood, an Apple developer-relations manager. That means reasonable performance with the ease of use desired by most users, who are loath to tinker inside their computers.
Sales results from the hotly anticipated release later this year of Id’s “Quake 3 Arena” could test that approach. Some industry watchers still doubt Apple will pass the test.
Apple will have a good year this year, said Rob Enderle of Norwell, Mass.-based Giga Information Group, “and crater [collapse] next year.”
Enderle predicted that the iMac and Apple’s newfound developer support will evaporate this fall, when a range of colorful, stylish and inexpensive copycat PCs flood the market.
Mac supporters say such doubts ignore the determination of the Mac faithful to maintain an island of relative independence from Windows domination--a goal even some developers seem willing to take risks for.
“I’m [supporting the Mac] because it’s the technically right thing to do, and to support people outside the mainstream,” Carmack said. “Microsoft dominating everything with what is basically an inferior technology would be a very bad thing.”
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Times staff writer Charles Piller can be reached at charles.piller@latimes.com.
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Title Fight
The number of Macintosh versions of games--and software titles of all kinds--declined in the last year. But software publishers have many new titles under development that could reverse the trend when released over the next few months. And despite the shrinking title list, unit sales of Mac games have risen modestly.
Mac games, unit sales, in millions
Jan-May 1999: 11.8
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Jan.-May 1998: 10.9 million
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Windows games, unit sales, in millions
54.0
43.2
Both Mac and Windows figures include titles sold in hybrid Windows/Mac CDs that can be used on either platform.
Source: PC Data
